29 April, 2013

Rhubarb
is the first fruit* to be harvested in spring.It usually appears around April, conveniently just after the last of the
stored apples have gone.It can be used
in many of the same recipes as cooking apples, such as pies, tarts and
crumbles.Rhubarb goes particularly well
with a hint of ginger, which adds a warm spicy note to the rhubarb’s tart
flavour.

Rhubarb
pie is easy to make, and can be served either hot or cold.Here’s the recipe.

Grease
a shallow heatproof pie dish.I use an
oval dish about 7” by 9” (about 18 cm by about 22 cm).

Wash
the rhubarb stalks and trim off the ends.Slice the stalks into pieces approximately 1 inch (approx 2.5 cm) long.

Put
the rhubarb pieces in the pie dish. Sprinkle the granulated sugar over the
rhubarb.Add the ginger syrup if using,
and stir to mix.

Rub
the butter and lard into the icing sugar and flour until the mixture resembles
breadcrumbs.

Add 1
Tablespoon (1 x 15 ml spoon) cold water and stir to mix.The pastry should form a soft dough.If the pastry is floury, add a little more
water.If it is sticky, add a little
more flour.

Roll
out the pastry thickly on a floured work surface until it is about the same
size as the top of the pie dish.

Cover
the fruit with the pastry.Trim the
edges.Roll out the trimmings and cut
into pastry leaves to decorate the top of the pie, if wished.

Brush
the pie with milk and sprinkle with a pinch of granulated sugar.

Stand the pie dish on a baking tray, in case any juice bubbles out of the pie during cooking.

Bake
in a moderately hot oven at about 180 C for about 35 minutes until the pastry
is golden brown.

Serve
hot or cold, with custard, cream or ice cream.

*I
think rhubarb may technically be classed as a vegetable, since it’s the stalks that
are eaten. ‘Fruit’ typically refers to a fleshy casing surrounding the seeds of
a plant. However, in the kitchen rhubarb can be used in many of the same
recipes as cooking apples or other sharp-flavoured stewing fruits, so from a
culinary perspective it behaves like a fruit.

13 April, 2013

Kingdom of Shadows is a time-slip novel set in
Scotland and England with two intertwined plots, one set in about 1290 to 1314,
one set in the 1980s. The historical plot centres on Robert Bruce and Isobel
MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, with other historical figures including Isobel’s
husband the Earl of Buchan and Robert’s queen Elizabeth de Burgh featuring as
secondary characters.All the characters
in the modern plot are fictional.

In 1980s Britain, Clare
Royland inherits Duncairn Castle, a (fictional) romantic ruin on the north-east
coast of Scotland, from her beloved aunt Margaret Gordon. The castle has been
in the Gordon family for over seven hundred years and Clare, like her aunt,
feels a powerful connection to Duncairn and to its earlier owner, Isobel
Countess of Buchan, a family ancestor who played a tragic role in the Scottish
Wars of Independence. But Clare’s husband Paul, a ruthless and distinctly dodgy
financier in the City of London, sees Duncairn first as a nuisance and then,
when an American oil company bids to buy the land, as a potential solution to
his secret financial problems.When
Clare refuses the American oil company’s offer, Paul tries to make her sell
Duncairn, by persuasion, fraud and force.Meanwhile, Neil Forbes, a Scottish environmental campaigner, is organising
a campaign to oppose both the sale of Duncairn and drilling for oil.He and Clare are on the same side, but for
different reasons, and Neil initially regards Clare as an enemy.As the pressure on her builds, Clare
experiences increasingly vivid visions of Isobel’s life, as though Isobel can
somehow call to her from the distant past.Is Isobel’s tragedy about to repeat itself through Clare?

I first read Kingdom of
Shadows years ago.I was reminded of it
more recently when I read The Lion Wakes,
because both novels feature Isobel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, as a major
character and involve a (probably fictional*) love affair between her and
Robert Bruce, though that’s about the only similarity between them.Kingdom of Shadows is a full-blown (and, at
over 700 pages, ‘full’ is the operative word) Gothic romance, packed with menace,
drama, passionate love and equally passionate hatred, with vaguely supernatural
forces looming in the background.The
first time I read it, I remember finding the supernatural aspects irritating, so
much so that I ended up skimming through quite a lot of the novel.This time I treated it as a fantasy novel
creating a world of its own that happens to have some similarities with late
twentieth-century and early fourteenth-century Britain, and that worked much
better for me.

Isobel (Isabel, Isabella)
MacDuff’s story, what little of it is recorded in history, is itself the stuff
of tragic romance.She was a member of
the MacDuff family of Fife, who had the hereditary right to crown Scottish
monarchs. Although her husband John
Comyn, Earl of Buchan, was a senior member of the Comyn family, enemies and
political rivals of the Bruce family, Isobel crowned Robert Bruce when he
seized the Scottish throne in 1306.This
conferred some traditional legitimacy on Robert’s rather hurried coronation,
which may lie behind the harshness of the punishment later inflicted on Isobel
by Edward I of England.(I’m trying to
avoid too many spoilers for readers who are not familiar with the history, so I
won’t spell out what happened to her here; anyone who wants to find out can
look it up on Wikipedia).

The modern plot in Kingdom
of Shadows has to go into overdrive to live up to the dramatic events of
Isobel’s true story.It reminded me of a
rather over-the-top Eighties TV drama series, with its ostentatious wealth, corporate
double-dealing, insider trading, fraud, blackmail, family secrets, deceit,
abduction, suicide and attempted murder.I gave up trying to keep track of all the double-crossing and fraud, and
also got rather lost among Paul Royland’s collection of rich and mostly rather
unappealing relatives and City colleagues.If the financial wheeler-dealing background to Clare’s tale is intended as
a sort of modern analogy to the turbulent power politics in fourteenth-century
Scotland that form the background to Isobel’s tale, it has the appropriate
level of dizzying complexity.

On this re-read, I was
struck by the degree of allegory between Clare’s storyline and Isobel’s.Not just in the broad parallels between the
situations of the two women – controlling husbands, a love triangle, the need
to make a stand – but also in details.Sometimes
the effect is quite powerful, as in their shared experience of imprisonment.At other times I found the allegory a bit
heavy-handed for my taste.For example, both
women are subjected to religious rituals by clerical brothers-in-law; and in
the historical plot Robert Bruce has an Irish wife, Elizabeth de Burgh daughter
of the Earl of Ulster, so the romantic hero of the modern plot,
environmentalist Neil Forbes, is duly given an Irish girlfriend. I wonder if
Clare’s passivity, which was another feature that irritated me first time
round, was also there in the interests of creating parallels between her
situation and Isobel’s. Isobel lived in a time when women, even wealthy
high-born women, had very few rights. Clare has lived a very sheltered life, a
beautiful rich girl who married straight from school, has always been dependent
either on her parents or her husband and has never had to take her own
decisions, and so she is easily pushed around by other people. Similarly, the unpleasant
portrayal of Isobel’s husband may owe more to allegory with Clare’s abusive
husband in the modern storyline than to the historical John Comyn.The historical Isobel clearly disagreed
politically with her husband on at least the matter of Robert Bruce’s
coronation, but as far as I know nothing is known of their personal
relationship except that the marriage had no surviving children, which could be
interpreted in many different ways.

The writing style is heavy
on detail – I didn’t feel I really needed a description of Clare’s outfit
almost every time she makes an appearance – and some of the descriptions of
Clare’s nightmares and visions of Isobel border on the repetitive. The pace
picks up in the last 200 pages or so as the various sub-plots involving Clare’s
friends and relatives either fall by the wayside or converge on the main
plot.Atmosphere and landscape are
conveyed well, especially at Duncairn with its mystical connection to both
women.

A useful map at the front of
the book shows the major locations in the tale, including the fictional
Duncairn, and a very brief Historical Note outlines Isobel’s known history.

Gothic time-slip romance
based on the tragic history of Isobel MacDuff, Countess of Buchan, during the
Scottish Wars of Independence, interwoven with and paralleled by a tale about
her fictional descendant Clare Royland in 1980s Britain.

*’Probably’ fictional
because although there were allegations of an affair between Isobel and Robert
Bruce in hostile contemporary chronicles, these may have been no more than inventions
by political enemies.

05 April, 2013

Thank your Liebster Blog Award presenter on your
blog and link back to the blogger who presented this award to you.

Answer the 11 questions from the nominator, list
11 random facts about yourself and create 11 questions for your nominees.

Present the Liebster Blog Award to 11 blogs of 200
followers or less who you feel deserve to be noticed and leave a comment
on their blog letting them know they have been chosen.

Copy and Paste the blog award on your blog

My answers to Kathryn’s questions:

What's your favourite novel and what do you love about
it?

-Impossible to pick
just one.Sword at Sunset, by Rosemary Sutcliff, for the marvellous writing.King
Hereafter, by Dorothy Dunnett, for the love story between Thorfinn
(Macbeth) and Groa. Legacy, by Susan
Kay, for the complex portrayal of Elizabeth I showing her cruelty and caprice
as well as her charisma.

Do you have any pet peeves in historical
fiction?-The same as in any fiction; dullness.

Your favourite and least favourite
people in history? (As few or as many as you like!)
-Alfred the Great.In part because of
his comment in his translation of Boethius, “a king must have people who pray, people
who fight and people who work”.I have a
soft spot for a king who actually recognised and acknowledged the importance of
working people.

-Least favourite? That’s
a hotly contested title!Too many to
mention.

The country, city or other place you'd
most like to visit?

-I have a fancy to
cycle the length of the Outer Hebrides, hopping from island to island on the ferries.

Which five people would you invite to
your fantasy dinner party?

-Aethelflaed Lady of
the Mercians, Hild of Whitby, the un-named early-seventh-century queen of East
Anglia, Acha of Deira and Bernicia, and Rhianmellt of Rheged.

All these women were important in early
medieval Britain.Aethelflaed ruled
Mercia and fought the Vikings in the early tenth century.Hild ran the seventh-century monastery of
Whitby and advised kings and princes – in modern terms her role was a sort of
cross between a university vice-chancellor, diplomat and CEO of a sizeable
company. The queen of East Anglia influenced (at least) key religious and
political decisions, yet we don’t even know her name.Acha and Rhianmellt made international
marriages that may have helped to weld kingdoms together, yet they are recorded
only as names.Historical fiction can
try to imagine their lives and characters; Theresa Tomlinson featured Hild as a
secondary character in Wolf Girl and A Swarming of Bees and Nicola Griffith
has a novel forthcoming with Hild as the central character; Kathleen Herbert
imagined Rhianmellt in Queen of the
Lightning; I have plans for the un-named queen of East Anglia when Eadwine’s
story gets that far. I would like to find out what they were really like.I suspect it would be a lot more complex and
surprising than anything in fiction.

Facebook or Twitter or neither?-Neither

What's one of your goals for the future?-Finalise Ring of Scorpions (the
follow-up to Paths of Exile) to get
it ready for publication

What's your favourite season?-Spring

Dogs or cats or neither?-Neither

What's your favourite hobby?

-Writing and the
associated reading about history.Embroidery,
dressmaking and hill-walking.

I know some of
these have already been nominated.Feel
free to take part or not as you choose, and to do as little or as much as you wish.These are 11 blogs that I enjoy reading and
that I think are well worth a visit.

Awards

About Me

I'm a scientist with an interest in history, particularly the history of Britain in the 5th-10th centuries AD (i.e. between the departure of Rome and the Norman invasion).
I write scientific journal articles, for which I get paid, and historical and fantasy fiction, for which I don't. I'm a keen hillwalker, though I live in the flatlands of East Anglia.
I'm a devotee of BBC Radio 4, the network that justifies the license fee all by itself.
Carla Nayland is a pen name.